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Reading Kevin Gilbert: Nuclear Weaponry, Media Ecologies and a Community of Memory

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Reading Kevin Gilbert: Nuclear Weaponry, Media Ecologies and a Community of Memory Reading Kevin Gilbert: Nuclear Weaponry, Media Ecologies and a Community of Memory MATTHEW HALL Deakin University I smell the smoke of the gum leaves burning I smell the tang of my peoples’ hair here where the smoke blows past and o’er me I stand alone in a desert bare. (Kevin Gilbert, ‘Genocide’) Born on Wiradjuri land in country New South Wales, Kevin Gilbert was orphaned at a young age. He was raised by relatives on an Aboriginal reserve and moved in and out of welfare homes, then left school to look for work at the age of thirteen. As per the biographic detail provided in Inside Black Australia—a collection which would earn Gilbert the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s 1988 Human Rights Award for Literature, an award he would reject on ethical grounds—Gilbert was sentenced in 1957 to a life of penal servitude for the murder of his first wife. While in prison, Gilbert undertook studies in printmaking and learned to read and write. While he gained notoriety as an Indigenous printmaker, his first play, The Cherry Pickers (1968), was smuggled out of jail and later produced at the Mews Theatre in Sydney upon his parole. From here, Gilbert would go on to become one of Australia’s most prominent playwrights and poets, known for his involvement in Aboriginal land rights and Black Power movements, as well as for playing a major role in the founding of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1972. Gilbert’s political, literary and artistic life were widely celebrated and continue to provoke admiration and debate. Many of his publications have remained in print since his death in 1993, including Living Black: Blacks Talk to Kevin Gilbert, which earned him the 1978 National Book Council prize, Because a White Man’ll Never Do It (1973), and the landmark anthology of Aboriginal poetry Inside Black Australia, published by Penguin Books in 1988. This analysis will attempt to conceptualise Gilbert’s approach to nuclear weaponry as threat to Country, by focusing on the poetic essay he contributed to Imagining the Real: Australian Writing in the Nuclear Age, edited by Dorothy Green and David Headon in 1987. Multiple poetic fragments were imbedded in this essay which were later to be published as the poems ‘Won’t you Dad?’ and ‘Seeds of thought’ in Gilbert’s posthumous collection, Black from the Edge. In his commentary in 1988 on contemporary Aboriginal poetry and poetics, Gilbert argues that Indigenous poetics shares in the universality common to all poetry, but underlying this is a traumatic and lived material experience of Indigeneity, which reifies conditions of violence and oppression in the postcolony (Gilbert, Inside xviii). This commentary from Gilbert’s introduction to Inside Black Australia explicates the way in which Aboriginal life and the patterns of Aboriginal narration shape and substantiate the formal structures of Indigenous poetry, much as Gilbert’s poetic essay posits nuclear threats to Country as having been shaped and substantiated by colonisation’s genocidal logic. JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 18.2 The nuclear imaginary, as identified by Gilbert, is informed by and reflects relations of subjugation for Indigenous people. It is the contention of this article that the thematic focus on nuclear weaponry and the nuclear imaginary in Kevin Gilbert’s poetry—as well as in the poetry of his contemporary, Kath Walker (also known as Oodgeroo Noonuccal)—reads historical, spiritual, and existential threats to Country in individual and collective trauma. According to N. Katherine Hayles and Matthew Fuller, the codes and symbols of a literary environment are transmitted generationally, and thereby inform the ‘ecology’ of the present media-scape (Fuller, passim). The thematic focus on nuclear threats in Australian Indigenous poetry can be viewed as partly constituting such a media ecology, reflecting the generational trauma of violence through technological expression of the bio-politics of colonisation. Jussi Parikka and Michael Goddard argue that the developmental transmission of media ecologies generally functions ‘through artistic/activist practices rather than pre-formed theories, which precisely work through the complex media layers in which on the one hand subjectivation and agency are articulated and, on the other hand, the materiality of informational objects gets distributed, dispersed and takes effect’ (Goddard 2). Given this consideration, a reader can conceptualise the impact of Oodgeroo’s and Gilbert’s focus on nuclear poetics and nuclear activism as establishing a media ecology in which Indigenous poetry engages with nuclear activism. In the case of Indigenous poetry that articulates a nuclear threat, this media ecology is generated through a poetic which incorporates processes and acts of subjectivation, mapping dimensions of relationality established between the individual, Indigenous narrative histories, and the collective, while addressing broader social forces through which the power of nuclear technology is wielded (Fuller 174). Specific poetic expressions of the nuclear devastation of Country—such as the nuclear testing at Maralinga alluded to in Jack Davis’s plays and Lionel Fogarty’s poetry, and explicitly referenced by Ali Cobby Eckermann’s 2016 poem, ‘Thunder raining poison’—can be viewed as operating within a pre-established media ecology. Contemporary Aboriginal poetry which is nuclear-focused, and the networks of relation and subjective-symbolic assemblages they rely upon, stem from a history of expression in which nuclear power and oppression are interdependent racial formations that extend the continuum of colonial logic. If, in following Patrick Wolfe, we consider colonisation as a structure of society rather than an event (2), the reader may begin to see how patterns of nuclear exploration, refinement, and devastation function to exploit the same oppressive, racialised endpoints as colonisation. The patterns of sensation expressed in these poems demarcate them within the political context of Australian literary history, and evidence a unification of aesthetics and activism in the struggle against the destruction of Country. This essay will analyse Kevin Gilbert’s literary work and vocal politicisation as laying the foundation for the present media ecology surrounding nuclear poetry in Australia. The recording and sharing of histories of Country which were otherwise erased by a mono- historicising nationalism entails an ethical act and remains the ethical imperative for many Indigenous writers. This ethical drive is to create a community of memory, essential to Indigenous culture and to the preservation of Country, which stands as testimony to the atrocities of Australia’s colonial history. Ethnographer and sociologist Deborah Bird Rose argues that within Australian Indigenous communities a claim on the past has a high degree of importance because in communities of relation ‘one’s death belongs not only to one’s self but to others as well: to those who mourn, to those who remember, to those who incorporate the death into a community of memory’ (27). The desire to maintain communities of relations and communities of memory testifies to the broader poetics that Gilbert sees as fundamentally HALL: Reading Kevin Gilbert Editor: Michael Farrell 2 JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 18.2 linked to Aboriginal narrative traditions. The spectre of nuclear death in Gilbert’s poems both stands in for and ruptures the silence of Indigenous suffering, embodying the epistemic and ontological threats to Indigenous communities as an ongoing apocalypse that must be stopped. The Subject of the Song The ten-year process of gathering the material for Inside Black Australia: An Anthology of Aboriginal Poetry gave Gilbert much time to ruminate on the state and structures of meaning within Indigenous poetry. The introduction that he provides to the anthology represents his most extensive examination of the interanimations between Indigenous narratology, image- complexes and poetic expression. Undertaking his exploration through anecdotes demonstrative of Indigenous narratives and the metonymic and mnemonic frames they employ, Gilbert chronicles networks of relation and interconnectivity. For Peter Minter, the relation to Country which Gilbert is expressing can be considered as part of the ethos of Country, a relation to ‘totemic geography’ (Morphy 103) that ‘is manifest in its substantiation of dimensions of correlation and habitation. More than just caring for or appealing to Country, an ethos of Country calls upon histories of “character” as they appear within networks of connection, interdependence and signification’ (Minter, ‘Transcultural’ 264). For Gilbert, as for Minter, Aboriginal painting and poetry are contiguous expressions of a site-specific spiritual praxis, formed by and constitutive of Country. Gilbert articulates this contiguity as a symbolic, mythological expression of place: As Aboriginal bark paintings reveal the fundamental elements of the subject, so too does the Aboriginal poet reveal the fundamental subject of the song. The emotional symbolism is, to a great degree, an extension of the traditional oral language, where the history or song cycle is recorded on bark paintings—symbolic mnemonics which link together the beginning and end of the complex whole— stimulating recall of the intervening details. (Gilbert, Inside xix) The ‘emotional symbolism’ which Gilbert sees as inherent to Aboriginal poetics
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